What a strange thing memory is. In 1980, long before I began dealing in vintage textiles, I was enjoying my first visit to the United States. I was in Chicago. It was February and it was very, very cold. Leaving a gallery on Lake Shore Drive I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the Sears Tower.
Street? Avenue? The cab driver asked, as I took my seat in the scruffiest cab I had ever seen.
I don’t know, I answered. It’s the tallest building in the world. Look you can see it over there. I indicated the top of the tower in the distance.
Yeh. But what’s the address? The cabbie asked. I looked up at his licence. A swarthy, mustachioed European face stared back at me. Under the photo I read the name Theodorus Theodoracopulos.
Theodorus did eventually drop me at the door of the world’s tallest building and I rode the fastest elevator (of it’s day) to the top. I walked from the first glass wall to the forth, I took lots of photographs and then, I wondered why I’d bothered.
What’s interesting about this story? The fact that I can remember the name of a cab driver I knew for ten minutes thirty years ago. But I can’t remember the details of the very well thought-out blog I had intended to write and spent hours planning just this morning.
All writing guides advise that: a writer should always have a notebook to hand. How right they are.
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